X-Message-Number: 7892
From: 
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 15:09:26 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Greeks

I'll try to make this rapid-fire:

1. Joe Strout says uploading is not the focus of cryonet. But the questions
are indeed  relevant to whether you should even bother about cryonics--if you
were convinced e.g. that there is no such thing as survival.

2. Joe repeats, in various ways, his belief that the main thing the brain
does is information processing in the ordinary computer sense. But this is
merely an ASSERTION, not a conclusion from prior and stronger premises. 

3. Thomas Donaldson says the fundamental material world (e.g. interacting
particles) does not do computing. Yet it must, in some sense. The interacting
particles must "know" the relevant data about each other in order to respond.
This vein (I'll omit the long discussion) could bolster the uploaders'
argument.

4. Is the universe digital? Depends in part on the ultimate resolution of
questions pertaining to the foundations of quantum theory. Currently, for
example, energy levels of an atom may be infinite in number but only
denumerably infinite, discrete. 
Space and time may also be quantized. (And as Mike Perry says, maybe our
universe is a simulation of another one, with Planck's constant larger in
ours so the simulation is quick and dirty.)

5. If another system is "functionally equivalent" to you, then it is you,
according to David chalmers according to Joe Strout. Again, a mere assertion,
depending on how you load the word "functionally." Basically, I believe, this
is again just assuming in advance the very thing you are trying to prove. If
your conclusion is the same as your premise, then your conclusion will
certainly follow--but it may not be correct.

6. The "quantitative" answer to the problem of survival or identity is one
that I and others considered a long time ago. "If it is 80% like you, then it
is 80% you." That this is intuitively very unsatisfying to most people may
not matter, since intuition is unreliable. Perhaps it doesn't matter either
that it leads to further strange questions, such as, "If each of ten other
people is 10% you--each a different 10%--would their collective survival
constitute your survival?" "Since my writings represent a significant part of
me, does survival of my writings constitute my survival in part?" Etc.

......But the main problem with all this, once more, is that it presumes too
much. It presumes (more or less) that we have all the information we need to
reach a conclusion about survival criteria, and we must form an opinion. We
don't have the information--e.g. about the nature of objective and subjective
time, the physiology of consciousness, and more. The ancient Greeks thought
they could unriddle the universe just by thinking about it; they were wrong,
and probably so are those who think we are in a position to reach firm
conclusions on these topics.

7. I don't think any of the uploaders really answered Thomas Donaldson's
reiteration of a couple of old problems with the information paradigm. Since
a "computer" essentially just manipulates symbols, how could it possibly
"know" the meaning of what it is doing? An electric circuit with resistance,
capacitance, and inductance can be used as an analog computer to do
integration; so can a system of wheels and gears. Isn't this simple fact
enough to make nonsense of the notion that such a computer "knows" something?

8. Finally, again and continuing, Mike Perry thinks feeling is probably
reducible to information processing, essentially just because the brain is
material and the feeling and thinking whole emerges from the unthinking and
unfeeling parts. Vaguely plausible, as is the information paradigm in
general, but I don't think it stands up; it is just a very loose analogy
which can be suggestive at most (and indeed Mike says "...suggests to
me...."). 

Once more to offer a specific possible counter: Suppose feeling &
subjectivity depend on a specific feature of brain anatomy/physiology, say
(oversimplifying) a particular kind of resonance or standing wave in the
electrochemistry of some part or aspect of the brain (whether local or
distributed). Variations in this PHYSICAL  condition may CONSTITUTE our
feelings of pleasure/pain etc. Certain things have to happen or exist in a
small region of spacetime. It is entirely conceivable (and I suspect probably
true) that the possible substrates for such are extremely limited--maybe even
limited to organic systems....And finally, for the umpteenth time, to say
that an emulation or model of the self circuit would be in some sense the
same as, or as good as, the original is just an empty assertion, not a
logical conclusion or demonstrated fact.

All right, so it wasn't so rapid fire.

Robert Ettinger


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